Motivational Mondays: Sell What You Believe

If you haven’t experienced TEDTalks, you’re in for a treat. At TED.com, you can stream the nonprofit’s award-winning videos of “Ideas Worth Spreading.” These ideas and thoughtful commentary can be addicting, and many of the talks about marketing, sales, entrepreneurship, etc., offer perspectives that apply to the daily lives of small business owners – people like you.
In that respect, this particular video caught our eye. In this 18-minute video, Simon Sinek argues the value of “why” when it comes to marketing what you do as a business.

What’s important to you? What motivates you to show up everyday?

Everyone knows what they do, he says, and most people know how they do it. But why? According to Sinek, this is the question. What’s your purpose? What’s your call? What’s your belief, and why does your organization exist?
“People don’t buy what you sell; they buy what you believe,” Sinek said. “The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.”
This isn’t just marketing, Sinek goes on to suggest. The belief system must be real, a brand created around tangible, honest values that are used to establish a culture around which your business will operate. This value system should be applied both internally as well as externally.
“If you hire people who can do a job, they’ll work for your money,” Sinek said. “If you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood, sweat and tears.”
Why did this strike a chord with us? I’ll turn this one over to Tannus Quatre, principal/consultant here at Vantage Clinical Solutions.
“This is exactly the approach we use,” he said. “We here at Vantage are about entrepreneurship – not medical billing, websites, EMR. People who are buying entrepreneurship will never leave us if we continue to bring it out of them.”
In other words, we’re driven by the same vision and the same values as our clients. It’s the perfect match, and we’re able to make such a match because people know “why” – why we exist and why we do what we do. Entrepreneurship is our DNA, plain and simple.
So take (not quite) 20 minutes and check out Simon Sinek’s TEDTalks video. Then consider your own values and the values of your organization. What’s your purpose? What do you believe? Why does your organization exist?
Why should anyone care? Let’s start a discussion.